Search Results for: travel series

Travel stocks revisited – building up a watch list

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My long term readers know that I did a lot of research on travel stocks in the past, however with little result other than a only slightly profitable investment into Expedia.

With the current situation, I decided to have a quick look at the travel sector again.

Up until now, the tourism industry has been seen as a secular growth industry, mainly due to 2 mega trends: Emerging market middle class tourists and older, more wealthy first world tourists were driving tourist numbers and subsectors such as cruises or AirBnB rooms. Just last year, “overtourism” became a major trend in social media, I guess this problem will not be a big issue in 2020.

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Online Travel Updates (Expedia, Booking, Tripadvisor, Trivago & AirBNB / Google)

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Expedia 

I invested into Expedia in February 2018 after the stock had become cheap enough. The idea was that a stock in a secular growth sector (online travel) should do well in the long run. After pretty decent fulll year 2018 numbers, with double digit increases in both, top and bottom, line, the first quarter 2019 showed a clear slowdown. Topline growth slowed to ~4%. Excluding Trivago which is still shrinking, topline sales would have grown +6%. Underlying profitability has improved although the first quarter is always the weakest one.

What I found interesting is the fact that Expedia performed better than Booking com. Here is a stock price comparison (including Tripadvisor  and Trivago):

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The “Watch Series”: Hengdeli Group (ISIN KYG450481083) – Chinese market leader in watch retailing

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No analysis of Swatch (part 1 and part 2) would be complete without a look at Hong Kong listed company Hengdeli.

Hengdeli claims to be the largest luxury watch retailer in the world and sells mostly in Hong Kong and Mainland China. According to several sources, Hengdeli has a 35% market share in selling Swiss Watches in China, so they are of course important for Swatch. How important they are, shows another fact. According to the 2014 annual report, Hengedeli’s largest supplier is responsible for 71% (!!!) of all watches sold. The two largest suppliers account for 88% of all watches sold.

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The “Watch Series” (5): Smart Watches vs. mechanical Swiss Watches (and Fitness trackers)

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Management summary
In the short term, I don’t think that the Apple Watch is a big danger for Premium Swiss Watch brands. Why ?
– putting some gold on a mass-produced electronic gadget didn’t work for smart phones either
– the smart watch doesn’t have a killer app yet and we don’t see an overall smart watch boom
– the observed decline in Swiss watch exports seems to be mostly caused by overall weakness in Hong kong and Macau
– however lower or medium priced brands could be affected especially in the coming Christmas season

The short-term danger to Premium Watches is much more a further cooling of Chinese and Emerging Market demand. Mid to long-term there could be issues as the market seems to be in the early stages of significant technical changes

Before I jump into more details I have to make a confession: I am myself not an expert on watches. As a matter of fact, I haven’t worn a wrist watch for the last 25 years.
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10 Years of Value & Opportunity – 10 Highlights, 10 LESSONS & 10 Books

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Again, time flies. Exactly 10 (!!) years ago on December 15th, 2010, I started this blog. 

FJ-10-anniversary-logo-cropped-236x179

As every year a very special “Thank You” goes  to all readers, especially those who actively contribute either by comments or mails. I need to keep on mentioning that the interaction with readers is really driving the motivation to continue the blog in this format.

In this post I will reflect mostly on writing the blog, highlights and lessons over the last 10 years plus my 10 all time favorite book reviews. There will be a 10 Year investment/performance review in the beginning of January 2021. 

Some numbers: 

10 year stat        
Year Visits % Germany Posts Comments
2011 93,811 na 411 694
2012 178,485 49.82% 266 1,368
2013 325,240 43.14% 168 1,243
2014 430,794 32.26% 121 1,068
2015 459,992 25.94% 110 1,105
2016 521,197 28.52% 113 1,645
2017 635,741 28.79% 114 1,580
2018 452,267 28.57% 92 784
2019 325,169 31.56% 84 563
2020 YTD 483,824 39.03% 107 1,211
         
Total 3,906,520   1,586 11,261

All in all, I managed to post ~1600 posts over these 10 years which created close to 4 mn visits. The drop of visits (and comments)  in 2018 & 2019 was clearly the result of posting less due to a lack of time from my side.

So why I am still doing this ?

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My 22 (+1) investments for 2019

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Edit: I actually forgot to include Expedia…..

This post has become now a small tradition at the end of December and is also very helpful for me to review my holdings.

The summaries of the previous years can be found here:

My 21 investments for 2018
My 27 investments for 2017
My 27 investments for 2016
My 28 investments for 2015
My 24 investments for 2014
My 22 investments for 2013

From the 21 stocks of last year, 4 have left the portfolio:

Silver Chef and Metro were clear mistakes from my side and I exited them as discussed with significant losses. IGE & XAO was a much more positive case. The company received a buy-out offer from Schneider SA and I exited at 138 EUR per share. DOM Security finally was merged into the main shareholder company SFPI. Luckily, I could sell 40% of my holdings at 75 EUR/ share.

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8 Years of Value & Opportunity: Staying alive..

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Once a year in mid-December I always realize quite suddenly that another year has passed and Value and Opportunity is now 8 years old since the first post in 2010.

As I mentioned earlier this year, for very positive reasons, both private and professional, activity in the blog did not reach the standards of the previous years.

Looking back, I still managed to look a these companies in more detail:

  1. Getinge / Arjo spin-off
  2. Softbank (part 1 and part 2
  3. Landis & Gyr
  4. Boiron SA
  5. Expedia
  6. Criteo SA
  7. Saga Plc
  8. Paul Hartmann
  9. Creditshelf
  10. DormaKaba
  11. SIAS SpA (revisited)
  12. FitBit
  13. System1
  14. Listed VC funds part 1
  15. Listed VC funds part 2 – Vostok New Ventures

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7 Years of Value & Opportunity – THANK YOU !!

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blogyear7

Exactly 7 years ago now, the first (German) blog post appeared on this site.

As I have done in the past years, this is a good time to reflect about happened over the year. Again a huge THANK YOU to all readers and especially those who actively contributed by commenting (critically) or sending Emails. And those who are suffering my sloppy spelling and grammar….

I am still surprised that I manage to keep this level of activity in the 7th year, but knowing that a lot of really smart people read my post is a fantastic motivation to keep going and try to become better.

Thank you again !!

The 10 most popular posts written in 2017

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Performance review 3M 2023 – Comment: “Please don’t give me a cyrstal ball & How to cope best with massive changes (Covid, Ukraine, Inflation)”

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In the first 3 months of 2023, the Value & Opportunity portfolio gained  +4,7% (including dividends, no taxes) against a gain of +11,3% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (25%), EuroStoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%), all TR indices).

Links to previous Performance reviews can be found on the Performance Page of the blog. Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in the first 3M 2023:

Partners Fund TGV: -3,3%
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +8,0%
Squad European Convictions +5,3%
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen 1,3%
Squad Aguja Special Situation +3,9%
Paladin One +4,9%
Alphastars Europe + 4,2%

I have slightly adjusted the Peer Group by eliminating Ennismore as it is actually a long/short Fund and Greiff Special situations. I have added Alphastars Europa, a quite new fund,. What I like about Alphastars is that one has an almost real time view into the portfolio. The Europa funds contains a selection of quite unusual but very interesting selection of European small caps and will be a challenging peer for me going forward.

Performance review:

Overall, the portfolio performance was again more or less in the middle of my peer group. As the peer group is pretty Small cap focused, the relative low returns correspond with the returns of European small cap indices. Looking at the monthly returns, it is not difficult to see that especially January was in relative terms very disappointing.

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